���ϲ�����

In May 2026, the Department for Education (DfE) in England released a series of featuring reality TV star Gemma Collins, who happens to have over two million Instagram followers. As she enters the building and walks through the DfE offices, she poses the question, ‘Right, what are we doing to help the children?’. In another post, she is on the sofa chatting to the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson about school and pathways to qualifications, during which they each reflect on their own school experiences and the passions that their education left them with. The BBC reported an immediate ‘’, and education social media went crazy. Some voiced heartfelt disappointment in the DfE for trivialising serious policy concerns. Some felt that at a time when difficult and contentious changes are being made to special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) provision in England, parents’ anxieties about children with SEND were being sidelined. Others simply used it as an opportunity for satire and ridicule. 

In the same week, the opinions of Peter Hyman, former headteacher and ex-Labour adviser, were reported in an article for the Guardian entitled . He called on ‘ministers to overhaul a system that trapped the young in a “rejection economy” where they were being failed by the education system, employers and social media companies’. He pulled no punches, stating that young people in England are victims of ‘“a taught and learned helplessness that our system encourages”’, and that a ‘joyless’ education system leaves young people with ‘vitriol and hatred’ towards school. Hyman’s views were reported a few days ahead of the UK government’s release of the written by Alan Milburn.

And in the same month, I was invited to write this 2,000th blog post for the ���ϲ����� Blog. My task was to reflect on how reading the ���ϲ����� Blog provides relevant and research-informed education insights for academics, practitioners and policymakers. What could be more relevant than asking that same question posed by Collins: ‘Right, what are we doing to help the children?’, or addressing Hyman’s shocking conclusions? Yes, these are two media sources based in England, but I have no doubt that any decent politician, parent, policymaker, practitioner or researcher in any jurisdiction would agree that these are valid points of reference for the relevance of a research-based education blog.

So, let’s turn to the ���ϲ����� Blog archive, and more specifically (as we now have 2,000 blog posts to choose from), I have selected five of the most read blog posts of the last 12 months. I start with the top-read blog post written by Alan Marsh (2025). This blog post provides an analysis of the latest DfE pupil census which ‘shows that the statutory education, health and care plans (EHCPs) for pupils with SEND, are on track to hit 10 per cent by 2035’. With a range of factors accounting for the increase of this figure, and new government legislation in train, the analysis underlines the importance of better supporting every child and young person to engage with and experience positive achievement through their school lives. It also demonstrates the scale and significance of SEND parent and pupil voice, which the DfE must itself engage with positively.

Curriculum revolution is called for by Sarah Seleznyov (2025), a primary headteacher in London who has moved back to schools after a long period in higher education. Her argument relates to ensuring teachers have the skills and agency to ‘plan to meet the interests, needs and contexts of the pupils they teach, while at the same time exploring the important knowledge and skills pupils need to develop’. To an onlooker this may seem deeply unradical, but after a decade of what some might describe as restrictive and reductive curriculum change, her proposals may be a very good way to start to answer the questions of what we are doing to help the children, and to ensure that schools don’t foster joblessness. 

‘The ���ϲ����� Blog provides bitesize opportunities to gain access to research-rich thinking, in relation to contemporary and often urgent questions and conundrums, across an international education landscape.’

A further reference to agency can be found in a 2021 blog post by Yana Manyukhina and Dominic Wyse, who note that while teacher agency is a common discussion point (perhaps most often in academic circles, as illustrated by Mark Priestley’s 2015 blog post), children’s agency gets less mention. They note that agency is commonly defined as ‘the capacity to act’, and like Seleznyov, recommend attention to curriculum in enabling this. They cite three elements of children’s agency: their sense of agency, their opportunities to exercise agency and crucially the affordances of agency. They thus extend the definition of agency to a ‘socially situated capacity to act’ – with curriculum as a key component of that context.

These four ���ϲ����� Blog posts, selected from a now extraordinary archive, are well read, and so they should be. The ���ϲ����� Blog provides bitesize opportunities to gain access to research-rich thinking, in relation to contemporary and often urgent questions and conundrums, across an international education landscape. In the light of this, one final blog post is worthy of a spotlight. In his 2025 blog post, Gert Biesta reminds us that ‘our ambition is to educate students so that they can lead their own personal and professional lives in meaningful, responsible and thoughtful ways’, and he cautions against a reading and implementation of research ‘evidence’ without judgment. And so, I would urge politicians and influencers to take heed. Simple technocratic solutions, populist policies and social media campaigns will fall short of addressing the complex social characteristics of education in a rapidly changing world, where children can too easily become victims of state decision-making.

Please see below a list of the top 10 most-read blog posts over the last 12 months